Financial Modeling & Valuation
Signature Course No. 129 — A Signature AI Socratic Coaching Course.
A New Kind of Learning
Socratic coaching, delivered by an agentic AI coach.
Not a course you watch. An AI coach you work with.
The Lighthouse Coach begins by discovering how you think about the subject, teaches what is missing, and gives you realistic practice before asking you to prove that you can use it. You may test out of concepts you already understand, while capstones turn the learning into a practical plan, decision, conversation, or other real-world result.
The curriculum is deliberately authored; the AI delivers it through coaching. It is not an AI randomly generating lessons.
A coach that teaches by asking — not by lecturing
The Lighthouse Coach is an AI Socratic coach built on Cognosco Learning's Financial Modeling & Valuation course, in the Sales, Service & Revenue category. It does not play videos at you. It holds a conversation: it asks you a question, listens to your answer, names the misconception it hears, affirms what you got right, and asks the next question — the way a great coach works in the room.
This is the course for owners and founders who will one day sell, raise money, buy out a partner, or be told what their life's work is worth by someone across a table, managers and operators who propose projects, acquisitions, and expansions that live or die on a valuation, analysts and finance staff whose valuations other people bet money, jobs, and plans on, and investors and lenders working at human scale who price small and mid-sized businesses where no ticker does the work for them.
It works in the order the work has to happen: first, Module 1 — What Cash Is Worth When It Arrives Later — work through Concepts 1–9, finishing with The Base-Case Valuation; then, Module 2 — Cross-Checks, Risks, and the Honest Range — work through Concepts 10–18, finishing with The Defended Range.
You finish by proving the whole course — in The Base-Case Valuation and in The Defended Range. You can type your answers, or talk out loud: the Voice Coach speaks its questions and listens to your spoken replies, hands-free. The course is self-paced and always on — roughly 30 minutes per concept, about 9 hours in full, taken in as many sittings as you like. Learners who already know the material can test out concept by concept.
This course runs on one company, one valuation spine, and nothing else — Harborlight Marine Systems, Inc., a fictional maker of dock lighting and marine electrical systems whose complete valuation inputs are stated once, in full, in Concept 2, so every discounted cash flow in the course discounts those inputs, every multiple is applied to those earnings, and every per-share figure divides by that share count.
No concept invents a second company with friendlier numbers, and no worked example quietly swaps in a different cash flow because the arithmetic was easier. And the second decision that runs through the whole course: a valuation is an argument, not an answer — every valuation here is built to be interrogated, bounded, and defended, not merely admired.
Both capstones produce real artifacts — a complete base-case discounted cash flow valuation memo, bridged to a price per share with its composition and limits stated in the open, and a defended valuation range brief for the same company, cross-checked by multiples, stressed by scenarios and sensitivities, and presented with its assumptions exposed — not just ideas about valuation.
This is the one hundred and twenty-ninth course in The Lighthouse Signature Series — the online counterpart to the one-day, in-person learning Cognosco Learning has delivered since 2002.
Course Facts
One full concept, coached end to end — free: verify your email and we’ll send you a link to start.
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Diagnose → Learn & Practice → Prove → Capstone
Every learner moves through the same discipline a Cognosco instructor would insist on in the room.
Diagnose
The Coach starts where the course starts: with the clock, not the headline number. Money has a clock — a dollar next year is worth less than a dollar today — and every concept opens with three questions that locate where you actually stand — what you already value well, and where the common trap is waiting for you. Everyone begins with Module 1 — no skipping the foundations you only think you have.
Learn & Practice
Work each concept in conversation with the Coach — spoken or written — then practice it against realistic situations until it holds up.
Prove
Every concept ends in proof: answer the check cold and demonstrate the skill. Know it already? Test out and take credit immediately.
Capstone
Finish with two capstones — The Base-Case Valuation for Module 1 and The Defended Range for Module 2 — that pull the whole course together, and earn the certificate.
What You'll Learn
Ask a room of businesspeople what a company is worth and you will hear everything except an answer: its revenue, its profit, what the founder turned down in 2019, what a competitor fetched, what the spreadsheet says to two decimal places. Valuation is the discipline that replaces those gestures with an argument.
This course teaches that discipline end to end. You will learn why a dollar next year is worth less than a dollar today — and by exactly how much, at a stated rate. You will build free cash flow from earnings, line by line, learning what must be subtracted before cash belongs to investors.
You will choose a discount rate honestly, in a simplified but defensible form, and you will discount projected cash flows step by step until an enterprise value stands on the page. Then you will confront the uncomfortable heart of the method: most of that value usually sits in the terminal value, an assumption about forever, and you will learn to size it, cross-check it, and distrust it in the right measure.
You will value the same business a second and third way — by comparable-company and transaction multiples — and you will walk the bridge from enterprise value to equity value to price per share without dropping net debt or a single share on the way.
Finally, you will stress the answer with scenarios and sensitivities, learn the classic traps that inflate value, adapt the method to a small private business with no market price to copy, and present the result the only way it should ever be presented: as a range, with its assumptions exposed.
What you will learn
- Use the time value of money as a working tool — discount any future cash flow to a present value at a stated rate
- Build free cash flow from earnings, and defend every line of the build
- Run a discounted cash flow valuation step by step, including an honest discount rate and a terminal value you have sized and cross-checked
- Value a business with comparable-company and transaction multiples, and reconcile the answers with the discounted cash flow
- Walk the bridge from enterprise value to equity value to price per share
- Test a valuation with scenarios and sensitivities, and name the assumption that owns the answer
- Avoid the common valuation traps, value a small private business on its own terms, and present a valuation range with its assumptions exposed
Everything in the course
- All 18 concepts of Financial Modeling & Valuation, in 2 modules
- A starting-point check first — the Coach finds where you actually stand before teaching
- Learn, Practice, Prove for every concept — no passive video watching
- A test-out on every concept: prove you know it and move on
- The Voice Coach: talk with the Coach out loud — it speaks, listens, and replies
- A personal Learner Record of your work across the course
- Two capstone exercises: The Base-Case Valuation and The Defended Range
- A printable session summary whenever you pause
- The Lighthouse Coach completion certificate (Signature Series)
- Your progress is saved as you go — stop anytime, resume where you left off
Built for the person who must build — and defend — the number
Financial Modeling & Valuation is for owners and founders — who will one day sell, raise money, buy out a partner, or be told what their life's work is worth by someone across a table, and who need to arrive at that table able to build the number themselves, managers and operators — who propose projects, acquisitions, and expansions that live or die on a valuation, and who need to know which assumption in the deck is carrying the decision, analysts and finance staff — whose valuations other people bet money, jobs, and plans on,
and who need those valuations to deserve the bet, and investors and lenders working at human scale — angel investors, searchers, community lenders — who price small and mid-sized businesses where no ticker does the work for them.
This course assumes comfort with arithmetic, a willingness to work with a calculator or a spreadsheet, and the statement-reading literacy taught in Financial Analysis & Modeling (No. 118) or gained on the job. It assumes no prior valuation experience. If you can read an income statement and multiply a percentage, you have everything this course requires to start — the rest is built here, concept by concept, on one company you will come to know very well.
Prefer to learn live and in person? The same material anchors Cognosco's one-day programs — browse the in-person catalog.
Start with The Base-Case Valuation
$195 — introductory price. One payment. No subscription, no password to manage.
Here is exactly what happens when you enroll:
- Pay securely with Stripe — you are taken straight into the course
- Create your learner profile and begin the Module 1 starting-point check
- Save the access key you are given — it restores your enrollment on any device
- Learn at your pace; your progress is stored in your browser on your device
For the full voice experience, use Chrome and allow the microphone when asked. Typing your answers works everywhere, all the time. Questions before you enroll? Email hello@cognoscolearning.com.
More Signature Courses are coming
Financial Modeling & Valuation is Signature Course No. 129. Leave your email and we'll send you news of future Signature Courses and Lighthouse updates as they are announced — nothing else.